ETK notes from youtube lecture:
Epigraph Quote:
At 25:00: “The Bush administration began building a global gulag for torture at Abu Ghraib, Baghram, Guantanamo and half a dozen additional sites worldwide. In February, 2002, the White House assured the CIA that the administration’s public pressure to abide by the Geneva Conventions did apply to its operatives and the White House also allowed the agency 10 enhanced interrogation methods designed by agency psychologists, including waterboarding.”
At 27:40: “In late 2002, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld appointed General Jeffrey Miller to command Guantanamo wide attitude for interrogation making this prison into an ad hoc behavioral science laboratory. Moving beyond the original attack on sensory receptors universal to all humans that were the foundation of the CIA’s psychological torture paradigm, Guantanamo’s interrogators extended the psychological assault by exploring Arab cultural sensitivity of sexuality, gender identity, and fear of dogs. Here, we recall the adaptable nature of the paradigm. This is innovation. General Miller also formed behavioral science consultation teams of military psychologists who probed each detainee for individual phobias such as fear of dark.
“Immediately after his public address to the nation on Sept. 11, 2001, President George W. Bush turned to his White House staff and gave them secret orders to allow torture saying: “I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.” In the months that followed, administration attorneys translated the president’s unlawful orders into US policy by adopting controversial neoconservative doctrines:
1) The President is above the law.
2) Torture is legally acceptable.
3) The U.S. Navy Base at Guantanamo Bay is not U.S. territory”
…. “Through this total three phase attack on sensory receptors, _____ (difficult to understand), and individual psyche, Guantanamo perfected the CIA’s psychological paradigm. After regular inspections of Guantanamo from 2002 to 2004, The International Red Cross reported “The construction of such a system cannot be considered other than the intentional system of cruel, unusual, and degrading treatment and a form of torture.””
In this 2006(?) lecture, author and professor, Alfred McCoy identifies the main components of psychological torture devised by CIA since the late 1940s.
He also identifies the “Covered Netherworld” (aka “Deep State”) as the “invisible interstices between formal and informal sectors of society.” Their largest commodity is illicit drugs- $480 billion/year.
CIA Psychological (no-touch) torture was first genuine revolution in science of pain and torture since the Inquisition.
McCoy states: “Words of definition are critical in this exercise.”
The CIA’s MKULTRA mind control experiments (1953 onward) were a veritable “Manhattan Project of the Mind”…. “An attempt to crack the code of consciousness.” With a cost of over $1 billion per year in the late 1950s.
This led to a distinctly American approach to torture. Psychological, no-touch torture.
CIA torture has these characteristics: It is elusive (hard to detect), resilient, adaptable, seductive (has darkly erotic appeal which leads to rapid proliferation to the torture of the many, and in inexorable escalation in the brutality), and destructive
In 2006, APA (American Psychological Association) banned members who inflict these identical major components of CIA mental torture:
1) Sensory (disorientation) and deprivation; attained by environmental manipulation to create moderate discomfort.
2) isolation… 30 days would lead to susceptibility to new implanted ideas. To effect fundamental changes in person’s belief. Relies on alternating sensory deprivation, sensory overload, heat and cold, lights on and off, etc.)
3) self-inflicted pain (forcing victim to stand for days; using various stress positions)
4) sleep deprivation and adjustment, for example, reversing sleep patterns from night to day
5) imposition of fear and exploitation of phobias
6) humiliation
7) excessive stimulation
(These same components are the core of the CIA’s psychological torture and many are used in the Global Gestapo operations- particularly isolation, sleep deprivation, humiliation, sensory disorientation.)
1963- CIA makes KUBARK Enhanced Interrogation Manual is based on MKULTRA experiments
See CIA’s (now DOD’s) Human Resources Exploitation Manual 1983…. which instructs “enhanced interrogation practioners” (i.e., torturers) to “manipulate the subject’s environment to create unpleasant or intolerable situations, disrupt patterns of time and space or sensory perception.”
Section 2340…
Guantamo was transformed into a behavior science laboratory.
The Military Commissions Act of 2006: This law strips detainees of their habeas corpus rights, sanctions endless detention without trial, allows the use of torture testimony before military commissions, it uses verbatim the narrow definition of “severe mental pain” this allows the CIA latitude for future psychological torture.
Astonishing Glimpse Inside Guantanamo Bay Prison:
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